Please Don’t Shut Up: Courageous Board Communication
By J. Patrick Traynor
Three Quick Takeaways
- Silence when you have something to say does a great disservice to your fellow board members and organization.
- Hypothetical scenarios can be a great way for your board to practice civil, courageous communication.
- Running the table at the end of each meeting is a great way to ensure that the entire board is on the same page and that every board member has had a chance to voice their honest opinion.
For your board to be as effective as possible, each and every director needs to possess the ability and willingness to communicate civilly and courageously. Poor communication among board members can have a profoundly negative impact not only on culture but also on the ability to effectively solve organizational challenges.
It’s our experience that, before courageous communication can take place in the boardroom, an environment must be created to encourage open discussion on all types of issues. When an organization is aiming higher than it ever has before, difficult challenges will inevitably present themselves. And one of the best ways to overcome difficult challenges is by tapping into your board’s collective brainpower through uninhibited discussion.
In this issue, we’re going to talk about helping you to create a more open and transparent board environment. We’ll also provide you with some effective practices to build board camaraderie and encourage your board chair and CEO to lead the way.
Step 1: Declare
The very first thing your group can do to become more effective communicators is to embrace the board’s duty to actively challenge the status quo. Remember: You’re on a journey of High Impact, so it’s time to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
You’re doing a great disservice to your fellow board members and the organization as a whole when you withhold your ideas, perspective, and expertise.
As Canadian psychologist and bestselling author Jordan Peterson says, “Silence when you have something to say is a lie.”
We’ve memorialized this ourselves within “Our Guiding Principles” (See Figure 1.5) We recommend your board develops its own set of principles be recited at the beginning of each board meeting (at least initially). This will help set the stage for open and courageous discussion.
Figure 1.5
Pictured above: DMF and Impact Foundation’s guiding principles. Each member of our staff has a framed copy, and the board of each organization reviews the principles at least annually. Download a copy below as you develop your organization’s own version.
Step 2: Practice
High Impact Boards regularly set aside time to learn and master important communication skills. From learning how to give and receive compliments to processing bad news to thoughtfully resolving disagreements, very little is left to chance. We recommend using hypothetical scenarios to give your board a chance to discuss how they would solve a challenging situation. Here are some hypothetical scenarios your board could work through:
- Sudden loss of a long-time CEO
- Disruption to a major revenue stream
- Multiple red flags in the organizational dashboard
At Impact, we do this type of role play at least twice per year as a board-and-CEO team. The scenarios themselves are determined by the board and CEO at prior board meetings and are sent out in advance to all attendees.
Another practice that High Impact Boards employ is what’s known as “running the table” at the end of each meeting. Typically, the board chair gives each director a chance to voice any additional concerns, ideas, or thoughts not covered during the meeting.
Running the table helps ensure that every board member and the CEO are comfortable with what’s transpired during the meeting. And if an issue is identified, everyone is provided with an opportunity to make their concern known so that the issue can be resolved. If the matter can’t be immediately resolved, it should be placed on a future board agenda, or next steps should be identified.
Step 3: Repair
When organizations shoot for the moon, interpersonal conflict is sure to follow. It’s important to remember that healthy disagreement and creative tension are features of a High Impact Board, not bugs. In fact, great boards instinctively understand that, without these things, there’s no growth, no improvement, and no significant progress.
One of the most common mistakes boards make is not addressing unhealthy tension or conflicts immediately. The board chair can play an important role in handling these situations. We ask our own board chair to be on the lookout for hurt feelings, unhealthy lines of questioning and comments, and any behavior unbecoming of a High Impact board member.
Regardless of how heated or tense an interaction gets, your board chair should always be prepared to artfully de-escalate a situation and steer it in a more positive direction. Of course, the best solution for conflict is to avoid it entirely. And the best way to do that is for each director to attempt to maintain civility and operate in good faith at all times.
Civil, courageous communication requires full buy-in from the entire board. And it’s not something that happens by accident. It must become the expectation and actively practiced by each and every member to truly become a part of organizational culture.
